Not the most exciting day but I'll give you the basics. We packed up and headed, along with Joe and Diane, to catch the 11.30 catamaran back to Trat. A lady on the boat shared her huge bag of rambutan with us all and we enjoyed popping the fleshy, eyeball-like fruits from their extravegant red and green tendrilled coats as we bobbed along the sea.
Back in Trat we checked in to Pop Guesthouse with Diane and Joe and went our seperate ways for a while: Joe and Diane to sort out a problem with their timeshare stay in Corfu and Matt and I to look for higher factor sunscreen.
Finding sunscreen in Asia is no problem at all. They sell it everywhere and much of what we found were the same brands as we see back home. The problem comes however, in the fact that almost every skin product is whitening. I don't mind whitening toothpaste, I could about cope with whitening deoderant bleaching my armpits, I cannot see the point at all in whitening lip-salve, but I really, really don't want whitening sunscreen. I don't mind not getting a tan because, even though I think it does make my pale, fleshy bits look better, I understand it is esentially just skin damage. However, reversing the natural melatonin build-up and making brown skin turn white in the sun just seems a bit freaky to me. I do keep meaning to read up on it properly but if anyone beats me to it, please fill me in.
Anyway, after several hours of scouring the shops and even a trip to Tesco, we were still struggling to find anything over a 20ml bottle (designed for faces and not the extensive surface area of a pudgy Westerner) of Factor 50+. We enquired about a taxi to take us to the Boots we'd heard was a few km out of town but since he was certain we were saying 'boat' not 'Boots' (even when I wrote it down he thought I'd just spelt it wrong) we decided it wasn't worth a trip to the pier and a confused debate.
We settled on buying a few bottles of Factor 30 from a shop near our hotel and went to the night market for dinner and fruit shakes.
No comments:
Post a Comment